LIFE IN A 3-WAY MIRROR... Reflections Inspired by Venus' Daughter

Namaste.

Twenty-four years ago this past Sunday, I was sexually assaulted.  One year later, on February 21, 1993, I sat on my bed thinking of the class I had entered Ryerson with in September of 1990.  I'd been so eager, so alive then.  Now they were less than three months away from graduating and I was at home, a straight-A-student-turned-university-dropout, my life snatched by the talons of depression and PTSD.  That was the 1st 21st - the first February 21st after the life-changing one. 

Sunday February 21, 2016 was the 24th.

On each anniversary since the assault, I have kept it as a reclusive, contemplative day.  A restorative and reflective day.  I have taken that day off from work as a gift to myself, a personal day.  It has been me, meditation, fire, a bottomless teapot, the Dharma, my piano, my pen, and my heartbeat.  For 24 years, I have barely left the house on February 21st.  It has become one of the single most important traditions in my life.  I broke with tradition this past Sunday, when I stepped out of the anniversary cocoon. 

I went to The Theatre Centre, on the 24th 21st, to see Obsidian Theatre's production of Venus' Daughter.

I am not a critic nor do I desire to be one.  Even if I was, I'm not reviewing the show.  That is not my purpose right now.  In order for the rest of this to have any meaning, however, I must explain briefly what it is about for those who haven't seen it. 

The play, written by Meghan Swaby, hurls us into the hurricane that is the mind of Denise, a young Canadian woman of Jamaican descent.  Overwhelmed by society's attitudes and judgments regarding the female form and its paradoxical love/hate relationship with the bodies of black women in particular, Denise attempts to understand her own identity while navigating the tumultuous waters of family dynamics (I admit to not catching some of the Patois; much more attuned am I to the nuances of the heavy Trinidadian accent than the Jamaican one) and the dual cultural swords of West Indian expectations and North American stereotypes.  Denise's understanding of the depths of denigration experienced by black women is deepened and then illuminated by her encounters with Sara Baartman.  A South African Khoikhoi woman who lived from 1790-1815, Baartman was sold to a Scotsman who took her to Europe, gave her the stage name “Hottentot Venus”, and put her on exhibit in a cage for public consumption.  She was examined by doctors like a rare breed of animal and became a fetishized freakshow that fed the white man's fascination with her “abnormal” body shape, particularly her large backside, first in Britain and later in France.  Upon her death she was dissected for further examination and spectacle, her brain and sex organs kept on display in a Parisian museum until 1974.  Her remains were not taken home to South Africa for burial until 2002. 

In the play, Denise, through her mystical meetings with Baartman and an array of other characters who call her self-image into question, endeavours to court self-love in the face of forces determined to impede her ability to do so.  She comes to see herself in Sara, corporeally and beyond.  Whether their moments together are Denise catapulted to the past in a dream, or Baartman as a ghost visiting the present is never certain.  It might be one or the other or both – but it is wholly uinimportant.  Sageness is a place in between.

In a time when there is so much conversation about voices in the margins having the stage, a play like Venus' Daughter is the entirety of the reason for that conversation.  Some of you reading this (if anyone is reading this) are accustomed to attending the theatre and seeing people who look like you telling stories written by people who look like you depicting the experiences of people who look like you.  For others, that very rarely happens.

I find myself typing now for one reason only.  It is because of the impression Venus' Daughter left on me as a person standing in the 3-way mirror, staring at a triad of reflections… a woman... a black woman... a black woman who has known abuse.  What a deeply personal moment for this woman, listening to her sisters preach the gospel of their bodies on the anniversary of the day that changed her relationship to hers.

This body thing can be a wicked woe, a bitch that can break you like a beating.

That women are valued for their anatomical attributes in our society is just about the greatest non-secret there is.  When everybody knows what “T&A” means, that should be an indicator that our collective priorities have long derailed.   Girls grow up being told on one hand that what matters is what’s on the inside!  It's your heart that counts!  It's your brain that counts!  Meanwhile the other hand whispers pssst that is like total crap; a kind heart and sharp mind are really just a decent backup plan in case your bod doesn't cut it.  As girls we were exposed to so many “perfectly” proportioned women during our childhoods – on TV, in film, in magazines, in music videos and on every billboard – that I'm quite sure many of us never actually entertained the thought that a different adult female body type existed.  The bombardment was so great that even with our moms and aunts and grandmothers right in front of us, providing much louder clues to how we might eventually be built than the women on MuchMusic and MTV, it didn't cross our minds that we might not all grow up to be hourglasses.  We anxiously awaited puberty, half-dreading it cuz of you-know-blood-and-stuff but half-excited... so excited... knowing that it would be bring with it our inevitable date with curvaceousness and an advanced sale ticket to womanhood. 

And then... either the realization of your fantasy... or not.  For some it worked out exactly as planned.  Their genes gave them Cosmo bodies.  For others, not so much.  Not that they weren't perfectly lovely bodies – they just weren't what we'd been sold, exactly.  I waited for hips.

According to the societal brochure, very round hips were going to happen.  There was a little hint of it, but not nearly what the brochure said.  How was I ever going to look like the Cosmo girls, especially in a bikini, without brochure hips?  This was more than a slight glitch.  Would the other parts of me turn out right?  My legs were becoming quite shapely – yes! – and I checked off that box.  But they were an extension of hips that weren't round enough, and this bothered me greatly.  Then there was my waist.  It wasn't tiny enough, and it needed to be smaller and more curved inward, especially since my hips weren't big enough for the ratio to be right.  I began doing ridiculous numbers of trunk twists and situps so that my stomach would be flat enough and my waist small enough to work with my insufficient hips.  Finally my waist started to look “right”!  But it wasn't as long as the brochure waist.  What the hell.  Why was my waist shorter than that one?  What was going on?  I lamented the apparent dearth of estrogen that was responsible for this disaster.  Of course I became all the more perplexed when the magazine right next to Cosmo advertised how to diet to take inches off your hips.  Wait – what?  I thought I was supposed to want bigger hips!  I was so awash in confusion that I was caught off guard when all of a sudden I found adorned with ample, “luscious” (not my words) boobs.  Uh, okay.  Okay!  So now I had Cosmo breasts and Cosmo legs with a too-short waist and insufficient hips.  Not good enough.  Not nearly good enough.  A full bosom could not replace a full deck, and my deck was clearly missing some key cards.  Everything from just under my breasts to just above my thighs was not as advertised in the brochure.  I hated that damn brochure.  I hated Cosmo.  I hated the girls whose genes were lucky. 

Stop hating, Tish.  Be nice.  Just be grateful for your thighs and calves and chest and don't be a bitch.

But my hips though...

This was just the angst of dealing with body image as a girl.  It doesn't begin to touch the complexity of dealing with body image as a black girl. 

Being a black girl meant that along with having large hips I was also supposed to have a bigger bum, which got a thumbs-up in my parents' culture but was considered kind of fat in North America.  Also, the ultra-slim look that was touted as hot in white culture was considered needing a good meal in Carib-speak.  I might not be deemed black enough devoid of the traditional black booty, the one that was the star of every Caribana parade.  I would hear black men speak of black women and use the word “thick” as a compliment, whereas the same sized women were heavy in Whiteworld which, being Canadian, was my dominant world.   This meant that ideally, I would be large-bummed and a bit heavier in black circles on the weekends, then shave off 15 pounds in time to see my mostly white school friends on Monday. 

And then, there was my nose.  My unmistakably “black” nose.  Growing up surrounded by straight noses was a very strange thing.  Mine was broader, as is racially characteristic, and “Flatnose” was the go-to tease the crueller kids would hurl my way.  I would sit in bed at night, beginning at around 6 years old, breathing through my mouth as I pinched my nose trying to make it straighter.  You may be shocked to learn that this did not work.  I finally realized that although I wasn't crazy about my nose on its own, it appeared to work in the larger context of my face.  I couldn't really do anything about my face.  I understood that the cutest girls were lighter-skinned than I, so I tried my best to be “cute for a black girl”, a phrase which I would hear uttered aloud by white boys and girls alike in later years.  Depending on who I was talking to, parts of me were either A-okay or totally unacceptable.  A black man told me once that I had “white girl lips”, meaning that they weren't full enough for his liking.  Meanwhile, even the slightest touch of lipstick on my mouth would prompt my white female friends to gasp “Oh my god I'd kill for your lips!”

I fast-forward to today and it's just as baffling.  The large behind that is considered fat by white culture on black women is somehow desirable on an Armenian Kardashian and a Puerto Rican Lopez.   Nicki Minaj exposes her butt cheeks and she's lewd, Mrs. Kanye does the same and the whole internet longs to bask in her bum's glow.  I sigh, confounded, as Caucasian women spend millions and millions of dollars a year lying on tanning beds, injecting fat into their rear ends and collagen into their lips, to get the same features that the culture rejects in women of African descent.  In a sick game of selective impersonation, black girls and women can only watch as the wannabe version of them is repeatedly more desired than the real version of them.  Black women who wear their hair in its natural texture are passed over for jobs as a matter of course. And amongst black women, the lighter you are, the better.  The feeling of being second best is one that it takes tremendous inner fortitude to overcome, especially when it is first felt so young and continues to surround you all your life.

And while all of this negation is happening, you still find yourself part of a group that is over-sexualized.  It is bizarre.  As black women, we see ourselves portrayed as more carnal than intellectual, sexually aggressive, and equally insatiable.  A white man, in a failed pick-up of epic proportions once told me that “He'd never been to the Motherland but would like to visit.”  (For those needing clarity, he was not talking about a literal trip to Africa.)  Another eagerly informed me that “He'd like to try out a black chick” – as if that was the best compliment he’d ever paid – and a gay white woman said to me that “I've heard black girls can go for hours.”  (Um, everyone gets tired, dude.)  But despite all of this, for the most part the sexual curiosity does not translate into attraction to black women as anything more than experiments.  The fact that when polled, men repeatedly cite black women as the least beautiful, is real.  The fact that black women receive by far the least interest on dating websites is real.  The fact that one of the groups that cites Caucasian, Asian and Latina women as being more attractive than black women is black men is real.  We have been on the bottom rung for so long, sometimes with our own men's boots on our shoulders as they reach upward for more prized women, that too many of us have grown roots there.

But I have digressed.  I was talking about lips, yes?  Ah, my lips.  Right.  At once not puffy enough for Black Guy and oh-my-god-they're-awesome to White Girlfriends.  The picture beside this is of my lips.  Puffy enough?  Not puffy enough?  Jesus.   I have it on good authority that they are highly kissable.  So whatever.

It was hard enough trying to figure out how to be attractive as a girl, never mind as a girl who was supposed to conform to the beauty standards of two different cultures simultaneously.  I would see black girls through my black lens and worry that they were getting too thin, then watch white friends excitedly remark “Have you lost weight?  You look fantastic!” to the same girls.  That would of course remind me that my black lens was an intra-culture thing, a family thing, and that the European standard was actually the one to keep working towards.  Unfortunately, my not-round-enough hips meant I sort of failed as the subject of both lenses.  Yeah. 

I learned to live, as we must, with the reality of what my genes had given me.  But if I thought it was hard then, I had no idea how much harder it would become.  When I was attacked out of nowhere and raped, every bit of work I had done in a bid to make peace with my skin was undone.

And THAT, there, is where Venus' Daughter became something even more for me.   

Everything I have spoken of up to now is where I met the character of Denise.  She is who I was not all that long ago.  Every black woman – especially first-generation Canadian black women – will know her.  And in many ways every woman will know her, as every woman knows the reality of objectification, exploitation and insecurity.  Every woman knows the struggle for self-acceptance that comes with surviving a world which tells us everyday that the casing we walk around in is other than as it should be.  We all know that mirror, so very well. 

But in Sara Baartman, a woman caged and then violated by for years by cold tools and white prying eyes, I communed with the girl who on February 21, 1992 was violated by a white man then caged for a decade.  I felt Sara with full feeling.  I communed with the woman whose body was used.  I communed with the woman treated like nothing.  I communed with the woman poked and prodded.  I communed with the woman stolen by a stranger.  I communed with the woman separated from herself.  I communed with the woman who could not save what she couldn't.  I communed with the woman who had no voice.  I communed with the woman who had no choice.

Held in that moment, I became Venus' kin too... her sister, perhaps.  Bearing a different but eerily similar scar, inhaling Sara's pain, looking at Denise with tenderness and wanting to tell her that all would be well... not because I have reached the place of total wellness – not yet – but because age has led me just a few miles further down the road.   And down the road, one realizes that how sexy a woman is has little to do with her measurements and everything to do with unmeasurables.

Venus' Daughter is not my “favourite” Obsidian production.  I didn't feel the wave of wonderment within me that I did during Intimate Apparel, or the raging fire in my belly that I felt watching Topdog/Underdog.  But the word “favourite” can be a shallow chalice and the experience of art is not an easily quantifiable thing.  Sometimes it is simply something else.  I extend love to every person involved with this production – playwright, cast, stage management team, designers, assistants/apprentices and director – for what you have contributed to.  It was a visitation unlike any I have had by the theatre, because of what I did feel. 

What I felt… what I felt… was recognition.

In Denise, I found an unflinching and stark recognition of what it is to walk a very particular walk that only a small minority of us in this society do.  But beyond that, I was able to connect to the even smaller minority, the black woman shedding the snakeskin of violence.  I have long believed that in art as in life, beauty and brutality live side by side and are often inextricable.  In Sara I saw a woman stripped of her autonomy, stripped of her dignity, telling a tale from the grave of her fight to recover both.  It was recognition that I have never felt articulated in this way on stage before.  It was recognition that I have never felt depicted so honestly.

I have said so much more than I planned to.  

I will simply end with thank you.

TT